The Tumbleweed Society - Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity (Hardcover)

Allison J. Pugh

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We live in a tumbleweed society, where job insecurity is rampant
and widely seen as inevitable. Companies are transforming the way
they organize work. While new working conditions offer gains for
some workers, others lose out. Home life offers little respite:
while diverse types of families are more accepted than ever before,
stability is increasingly lacking in our intimate lives.
In The Tumbleweed Society, sociologist Allison Pugh examines the
ways we navigate questions of commitment and flexibility at work
and at home in a society where insecurity has become the norm.
Drawing on 80 in-depth interviews with three groups of parents who
vary in their experiences of job insecurity and family structure,
Pugh explores how people are adapting to the new culture of
insecurity and how these adaptations themselves affect what we can
expect from each other.
Faced with perpetual insecurity both at work and at home, people
construct stronger walls between the two, expecting little or
nothing from their jobs and placing nearly all of their
expectations for fulfilling connections on their intimate
relationships. This trend, Pugh argues, often has the effect of
making intimate lives even more fraught, reproducing the very
tumbleweed dynamics they seek to check. Pugh shows that our
experiences of insecurity shape the way we talk about obligations,
how we interpret them as commitments we will or will not shoulder,
how we conceive of what we owe each other--indeed, how we are able
to weave the fabric of our connected lives.